On This Day in History

1 943:     Operation FLAX. North West African Air Force attacks Axis air transport service between Italy via Sicily to Tunisia; 201 enemy aircraft are destroyed.

1975:     Operation BABYLIFT: A MAC C-5 crashes in an emergency landing near Saigon while flying the op’s 1st mission; 138 die and 176 survive the crash. Flight Nurse 1Lt Regina C. Aune ignores severe

  1996:     A 76th Airlift Squadron CT-43 transport crashes near Dubrovnik, Croatia killing 35, including Commerce Secretary Ronald Brown. Brown was on an economic development mission to the former Yugoslavia.

  1915:     President Wilson appoints the first members to the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). In 1958, NACA becomes NASA.  

1952:     KOREAN WAR. Fifth Air Force Sabre pilots destroy ten MiGs while losing one F-86. In the battle, Col Francis S. Gabreski, the 51st Fighter-Interceptor Wing Commander, destroys a MiG to become the eighth jet

  2003: Operation Noble Eagle. By this date in the Global War on Terrorism, the Air National Guard had flown 72 % of fighter sorties, 52 % of tanker, and 35 % of airlift.

1961: President John F. Kennedy asks Congress to: (1) put 50 percent of SAC’s bombers on ground alert; (2) speed up the B-47 phaseout; (3) produce the Skybolt to replace the Hound Dog missile; (4)

  1945: Gen Carl Spaatz sends Eighth Air Force bombers and P-51 escorts against Berlin to destroy the Luftwaffe. General Galland of the Luftwaffe later said, “Whenever our fighters appeared, the Americans hurled themselves at

  1999: Operation ALLIED FORCE. An F-15 shoots down two MiG-29s in aerial combat over Yugoslavia on the third day of the operation.

    1975: USAF organizes an airlift to evacuate 10,000 people a day from Da Nang, South Vietnam. Communist forces had surrounded and completely cut off this provincial city.